Last night on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Lorde performed “Perfect Places,” her fittingly both cathartic and melancholy ode to ephemerality as embodied in a night out, in a hookup. The performance, accompanied by a band and a chorus, is fantastic, and features some of Lorde’s always welcome erratic dance moves. She also spoke with Seth Meyers about the album as a whole — discussing working with her co-producer, Jack Antonoff; her rare love of the New York subway (despite having been held captive by its increasingly bad service for 4 hours recently); and synesthesia.
She describes how her experiences with this sensory-overlapping form of perception impact her music, saying, that with synesthesia, “music and words have colors and textures and forms. Making music is a really visual process.” But she also emphasizes, “sometimes I try to keep the color thing away from synesthesia Muggles, cause I feel like it’s super annoying. But I would slip and be like, [a song] ‘just doesn’t look very nice.”
When asked what the colors of the music on Melodrama are, Lorde points to the cover art — by Sam McKinniss (incidentally, a completely exquisite and expressive album cover) — as a reference.
Watch Lorde’s performance:
Here’s her chat with Meyers: